Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Recycling While Away From Home

Summer vacation time is fast approaching and you are likely planning what your vacation will be. There is one part of planning you may not have thought about and that is recycling. You likely have a recycling system at home but what do you do when you are away from home?

There are a few different options.

Take the recycling back home with you. This option can be hard if you have very much and near impossible if you are flying but if it's a short car trip it may be doable.

Ask the hotel if they offer recycling. Many hotels now recycle and either have bins in the room or if you call down they can tell you where a bin is. Some also will tell you just to leave it on the counter with a note for housekeeping and they will take care of you.

You can find a local drop-off. Many cities have drop-offs for recycling. You can find out where one is with Earth911.com. You can use the website or their app iRecycle to find where you can recycle items.

Recycle at Target. Target now offers some recycling so that can be an option while you are away. They offer recycling for cans, glass plastic bottles, plastic bags, MP3 players, ink cartridges and cell phones.

Between all of these options you can likely recycle at least some of your waste while you are away from home. And don't forget to bring reusable water bottles and bags so you have less to recycle in the first place.

Do you recycle when on vacation? If so what have you found to be the easiest way to do so?

4 comments:

We just experienced this last week. We were on vacation and going through a large number of cans and jars by cooking in our room. We asked the hotel front desk if they recycled and they said they didn't. We looked around for the familiar green cans on street corners in pedestrian high-traffic areas, and saw none (apparently the entire city didn't recycle?). We finally looked up recycling centers online, and found one about 20mins away. We made a short detour while heading to a restaurant in the same area as the recycling center, and dropped off two large paper bags. I later joked to my husband that he never would have gone out of his way to recycle cans before he met me ;)

I'm so bad about it, I bring it back home with me so that my small town recycler can stay operational as the $$ they get is what is helping them stay open. I want them open since they are only a mile from my house as opposed to the 20 mins I used to drive to recycle since I don't have curbside recycling where I live.

I've found that highway rest stops often have recycling bins, but it varies by state - Iowa definitely does, we just drove through there after Easter.

Also, most places you can camp do recycling - all the state and national parks we've stayed at do, and I was in a KOA in Colorado recently that did as well (my parents are fulltime RVers and claim they don't recycle because parks don't, but often the city/county/tribal/state parks do.)